Thousands of Egyptian textile workers are striking over low pay in a northern Egyptian city where protests in 2011 helped spark the revolution against Hosni Mubarak.

As many as 16,000 workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company (MSWC) in Mahalla have gone on strike demanding higher wages and benefits, and the payment of delayed bonuses.

According to reports, as many as 10,000 people from the company joined the strike yesterday alone in a region of Egypt that is considered the heart of Egypt’s textile industry. MSWC is Egypt’s largest state-owned company and employs more than 25,000 workers.

The strikes broke out as Egypt reported its annual consumer price inflation jumped in July to 33 percent, from 29.8 percent in June - the highest rate since the flotation of the Egyptian pound in November to help meet the terms of the $12bn IMF loan agreement.

Egypt also raised fuel prices by up to 50 percent in July to help meet the terms of the agreement, meaning that many ordinary Egyptians are struggling to make ends meet.

On Tuesday, management reportedly met workers' representatives and offered a 10 percent basic salary rise to end the strike.

Workers rejected the offer and said they would not return to work until their demands - which include a 10 percent increase in both basic salary and social benefits, and an increase in food allowance - were met.

Broken promises

Workers had been expecting to receive a 10 percent rise in basic salary which had been pledged to public sector workers by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in June.

But later that month, Ashraf el-Sharkawy, the public business minister, said factory workers would not receive the rise because they had received an end-of-year profit share.

Workers are now refusing to end the strike until Sharkawy pays what they say is owed.

"For the past couple of weeks, we have organised short rallies inside the factory after working hours, demanding the raise," said strike leader Faisal Loksha to Ahram online.

"As our demands had not been met, we decided to go on a full strike in the factory."

According to an interview with a worker in the online publication Mada Masr, all of the company’s factories are now participating in the strike, including eight weaving factories, seven garment factories and 11 textile factories.

Workers at another textile company, Misr Shebin El Kom, were also angered after their exceptional bonus, food allowance and other bonuses approved by Sisi were rejected. Workers have reduced production in an attempt to pressure the company to meet their demands.

Mahalla has a long history of protest and activism. Workers struck in 2006 to protest market reforms, while, beginning in April 2008, the city held mass demonstrations to dispute the election result of Mubarak and demand better wages.

Videos of the resulting police crackdown were shared across social media and set off a whirlwind of protest across the country that eventually led to Mubarak’s fall.

FOR ONCE, Donald Trump has a point. “We can’t let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that,” he told Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, according to the transcript from their bizarre phone conversation that was leaked to The Intercept in May.

The madman the U.S president was referring to, of course, was North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The madman the rest of us should be worried about, however, is Trump himself, who — lest we forget — has the sole, exclusive and unrestricted power to launch almost 1,000 nuclear warheads in a matter of minutes, should he so wish.

Most nonproliferation experts — as well as former President Jimmy Carter and a number of former Pentagon and State Department officials, both Republican and Democrat — agree that the brutal and murderous Kim, for all his bluster, is not irrational or suicidal, but bent on preserving his regime and preventing a U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons are a defensive, not an offensive, tool for the North Korean leadership — which, as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary William Perry observed on Fox News in April, may be “ruthless and … reckless” but “they are not crazy.”

Got that? Kim is bad, not mad.

The same cannot be said of The Donald. Think I’m being unfair? In February, a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers wrote to the New York Times “that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.” In April, another group of mental health experts told a conference at Yale University’s School of Medicine that Trump was “paranoid” and “delusional” and referred to the president’s “dangerous mental illness.”

Is it any wonder then that so many recentreports suggest that South Koreans are more worried about Trump than they are about the threat posed by their hostile and paranoid neighbor?

People watch a broadcast displaying U.S. President Donald Trump on a screen at a train station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017.

Photo: Lee Jin-man/AP

Consider Trump’s reaction this week to a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment — leaked to the Washington Post — that the DPRK is now able to construct a nuclear warhead small enough to fit inside its missiles. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” the president declaimed, in response to a reporter’s question at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

How is this not an unhinged response from the so-called Leader of the Free World? In May, he said he would be “honored” to meet with Kim and praised him as a “pretty smart cookie.” In August, he took a break from his golfing vacation to casually threaten nuclear annihilation of Kim’s country (not even on the basis of any aggression by the DPRK, incidentally, but only their “threats”).

Does Trump understand the difference between escalating and de-escalating a nuclear crisis? Listen to Republican Senator John McCain, who has never met a “rogue nation” he did not want to bomb, invade or occupy. “I take exception to the president’s words,” McCain said on Tuesday, adding: “That kind of rhetoric, I’m not sure how it helps.”

I mean, just how crazy do you have to be to advocate a preemptive nuclear strike that even McCain cannot get behind?

Trump has form, though, when it comes to loose talk about nukes. During the presidential campaign, in August 2016, MSNBC host and ex-Republican congressman Joe Scarborough revealed that Trump, over the course of an hour-long briefing with a senior foreign policy adviser, had asked three times about the use of nuclear weapons. At one point during the meeting, according to Scarborough, the then-GOP presidential candidate asked his adviser, “If we had them, why can’t we use them?”

Coverage of an ICBM missile test is displayed on a screen in a public square in Pyongyang on July 29, 2017. Kim Jong-un boasted of North Korea’s ability to strike any target in the U.S. after an ICBM test that weapons experts said could even bring New York into range.

Photo: Kim Won-Jin/AFP/Getty Images

To be so blasé, enthusiastic even, about the deployment of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction is a stark indicator of Trump’s childishness, ignorance, belligerence, and, yes, derangement. Here is a president who is impulsive, erratic, unstable; whose entire life and career have been defined by a complete lack of empathy. Remember his strategy for defeating ISIS? “Bomb the shit out of ’em” and “take out their families.”

So do you think civilian casualties were on his mind when he issued his “fire and fury” warning? Come. Off. It.

Listen to McCain’s fellow Republican super-hawk Senator Lindsay Graham. “If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim], it will be over there,” Graham told NBC’s Matt Lauer last week, recounting a recent conversation he had with the president. “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die over here — and he’s told me that to my face.”

Remember that 72 years ago today, the United States dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, killing around 39,000 people in Nagasaki. Three days earlier, the first A-bomb killed around 66,000 people in Hiroshima. But a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula would make those strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like pinpricks. Experts say even a conventional war between the U.S. and the DPRK could kill more than 1 million people; a nuclear exchange, therefore, might result in tens of millions of casualties. Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has admitted that such a preemptive strike by the U.S. would be a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

Does the president care? Graham doesn’t seem to think so. Trump’s former ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who spent 18 months in his company while working on The Art of the Deal, has called the president a “sociopath.” In fact, one quote more than any other stood out from Schwartz’s much-discussed interview with the New Yorker in July 2016 and, perhaps, should keep us all awake at night. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes,” said Schwartz, “there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

A local official revealed on Tuesday that a network of fake companies based in Jordan has been established in order to buy Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank for Jewish settlers, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed has reported. The settlers, it is claimed, are from the settlement of Amona, which Israel also regarded as illegal; and evacuated earlier this year.

According to the neighbourhood head in Silwad, located to the east of Ramallah, a Jordanian MP is involved. Abdul-Rahman Saleh added that these companies pay high prices for the land, up to 60,000 Jordanian Dinars for each dunam (quarter of an acre), whereas the market rate would be around 2,000 Dinars. Saleh said that some of the Palestinians traveled to Jordan to be paid the money.

After a review of the companies in question, he explained, they denied that they are buying land for Israeli settlers. However, he stressed that they have a history of buying real estate in Jerusalem on behalf of Israelis.

Saleh named these allegedly fake firms as Watan Company, Waheeb Company and the Holy Land Company; they are, he claimed, run by Palestinians and Jordanians, including a Jordanian MP.

The Palestinian official revealed that an attempt by Watan Company to buy land in Silwad was unsuccessful, even though the company offered $500,000 to the owner. He warned that if a single dunam was sold to the Israeli settlers from Amona, this would enable them to go back to the area and rebuild the settlement. He insisted that the evacuated settlers have been trying to return and rebuild it.

Saleh pointed out that his municipality had cooperated with a number of organisations to spread awareness of the danger of Israeli measures in the area. He is in constant touch with the PA security services on this issue. He also revealed that the Israeli settlers tried to seize some land near the Amona site under the pretext of Israel’s Absentee Law, but failed.

WASHINGTON — Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant here, likes to tell his clients that there are “three keys to credibility.”

“One, never defend the indefensible,” he says. “Two, never deny the undeniable. And No. 3 is: Never lie.”

Would that politicians took his advice.

Fabrications have long been a part of American politics. Politicians lie to puff themselves up, to burnish their résumés and to cover up misdeeds, including sexual affairs. (See: Bill Clinton.) Sometimes they cite false information for what they believe are justifiable policy reasons. (See: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.)

But President Trump, historians and consultants in both political parties agree, appears to have taken what the writer Hannah Arendt once called “the conflict between truth and politics” to an entirely new level.

From his days peddling the false notion that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, to his inflated claims about how many people attended his inaugural, to his description just last week of receiving two phone calls — one from the president of Mexico and another from the head of the Boy Scouts — that never happened, Mr. Trump is trafficking in hyperbole, distortion and fabrication on practically a daily basis.

In part, this represents yet another way that Mr. Trump is operating on his own terms, but it also reflects a broader decline in standards of truth for political discourse. A look at politicians over the past half-century makes it clear that lying in office did not begin with Donald J. Trump. Still, the scope of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods raises questions about whether the brakes on straying from the truth and the consequences for politicians’ being caught saying things that just are not true have diminished over time.

One of the first modern presidents to wrestle publicly with a lie was Dwight D. Eisenhower in May 1960, when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace.

The Eisenhower administration lied to the public about the plane and its mission, claiming it was a weather aircraft. But when the Soviets announced that the pilot had been captured alive, Eisenhower reluctantly acknowledged that the plane had been on an intelligence mission — an admission that shook him badly, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said.

“He just felt that his credibility was such an important part of his person and character, and to have that undermined by having to tell a lie was one of the deepest regrets of his presidency,” Ms. Goodwin said.

In the short run, Eisenhower was hurt; a summit meeting with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev collapsed in acrimony. But the public eventually forgave him, Ms. Goodwin said, because he owned up to his mistake.

In 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, President Richard M. Nixon was accused of lying, obstructing justice and misusing the Internal Revenue Service, among other agencies, and resigned rather than face impeachment. Voters, accustomed to being able to trust politicians, were disgusted. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the presidency after telling the public, “I’ll never lie to you.”

President Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction in trying to cover up his affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, during legal proceedings. Chris Lehane, a former Clinton adviser, said Mr. Clinton’s second-term agenda suffered during his impeachment, yet paradoxically his favorability ratings remained high — in part, Mr. Lehane said, because “the public distinguished between Clinton the private person and the public person.”

But sometimes it’s easier to tell what’s false than what’s a lie. President George W. Bush faced accusations that he and members of his administration took America to war in Iraq based on false intelligence about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush and his team emphasized and in some cases exaggerated elements of the intelligence that bolstered the case while disregarding dissenting information, leading critics to accuse them of lying. Among those who said Mr. Bush had lied was Mr. Trump.

Over the past two decades, institutional changes in American politics have made it easier for politicians to lie. The proliferation of television political talk shows and the rise of the internet have created a fragmented media environment. With no widely acknowledged media gatekeeper, politicians have an easier time distorting the truth.

And in an era of hyper-partisanship, where politicians often are trying to court voters at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, politicians often lie with impunity. Even the use of the word “lie” in politics has changed.

“There was a time not long ago when you could not use the word ‘lie’ in a campaign,” said Anita Dunn, once a communications director to Mr. Obama. “It was thought to be too harsh, and it would backfire. So you had to say they hadn’t been honest, or they didn’t tell the truth, or the facts show something else, and even that was seen as hot rhetoric.”

With the rise of fact-checking websites, politicians are held accountable for their words. In 2013, the website PolitiFact declared that Mr. Obama had uttered the “lie of the year” when he told Americans that if they liked their health care plan they could keep it. (Mr. Trump won “lie of the year” in 2015.)

“I thought it was unfair at the time, and I still think it’s unfair,” Ms. Dunn said, referring to Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama later apologized to people who were forced off their plans “despite assurances from me.”

On the theory that politicians who get caught in lies put their reputations at risk, Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College (and contributor to The New York Times’s Upshot) and some colleagues tried to study the effects of Mr. Trump’s misstatements during last year’s presidential campaign.

In a controlled experiment, researchers showed a group of voters a misleading claim by Mr. Trump, while another group saw that claim accompanied by “corrective information” that directly contradicted what Mr. Trump had said. The group that viewed the corrections believed the new information, but seeing it did not change how they viewed Mr. Trump.

“We know politicians are risk averse. They try to minimize negative coverage, and that negative coverage could damage their image over time,” Mr. Nyhan said. “But the reputational consequences of making false claims aren’t strong enough. They’re not sufficiently strong to dissuade people from misleading the public.”

Of course, lying to court voters is one thing, and lying to federal prosecutors quite another. When Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, was accused of a long list of federal corruption counts related to claims that he tried to sell Mr. Obama’s seat in the United States Senate, he was asked quite directly about lying.

While Mr. Blagojevich was testifying under oath, a prosecutor pressed him on whether he made a habit, as a politician, of lying to the public. They sparred over whether Mr. Blagojevich had fed a misleading story to a local newspaper.

“That was a lie,” the prosecutor, Reid Schar, was quoted as saying.

Mr. Blagojevich refused to fess up. “That was a misdirection play in politics,” he answered.

He was sentenced to a 14-year prison term in 2011.

Joel Sawyer, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, said there were two ways for a politician to deal with deceit.

“One is to never acknowledge it, which seems to have been employed pretty successfully by our current president,” Mr. Sawyer said. “The second is to rip the Band-Aid off and say: ‘I screwed up; here’s why. Give me another chance, and I won’t disappoint you again.’”

Mr. Sawyer worked for a politician — Mark Sanford, then the governor of South Carolina — who took the latter approach. On a June weekend in 2009, Mr. Sanford slipped out of the South Carolina capitol and flew to Buenos Aires to be with his lover, but told his staff that he had gone hiking on the Appalachian Trail. His aides, including Mr. Sawyer, unknowingly passed the lie on to reporters.

Many of Mr. Trump’s lies — like the time he boasted that he had made the “all-time record in the history of Time Magazine” for being on its cover so often — are somewhat trivial, and “basically about him polishing his ego,” said John Weaver, a prominent Republican strategist.

That mystifies Bob Ney, a Republican former congressman who spent time in prison for accepting illegal gifts from a lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, and lying to federal investigators about it. “It really baffles me why he has to feel compelled to exaggerate to exonerate himself,” Mr. Ney said.

But other presidential lies, like Mr. Trump’s false claim that millions of undocumented immigrants had cast ballots for his opponent in the 2016 election, are far more substantive, and pose a threat, scholars say, that his administration will build policies around them.

The glaring difference between Mr. Trump and his predecessors is the sheer magnitude of falsehoods and exaggerations; PolitiFact rates just 20 percent of the statements it reviewed as true, and a total of 69 percent either mostly false, false or “Pants on Fire.” That leaves scholars like Ms. Goodwin to wonder whether Mr. Trump, in elevating the art of political fabrication, has forever changed what Americans are willing to tolerate from their leaders.

“What’s different today and what’s scarier today is these lies are pointed out, and there’s evidence that they’re wrong,” she said. “And yet because of the attacks on the media, there are a percentage of people in the country who are willing to say, ‘Maybe he is telling the truth.’”

Correction: August 9, 2017

An article on Monday about presidents who have been caught in lies gave an incorrect date for the height of the Watergate scandal, when President Richard M. Nixon was accused of lying, obstructing justice and finally resigned. It was 1974, not 1972.

Repressive governments want to silence Al Jazeera because it reflects the concerns, aspirations and dreams of the Arab streetJamal ElshayyalLinkAs a war correspondent, I am obliged to routinely undergo what’s known as “Hostile Environment Training”, a course designed to prepare me for how best to survive in violent or life threatening situations.

I remember the first time I attended this course several years ago, as it dawned on me just how dangerous our profession has become.

Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars on Gaza and Lebanon have proven to be a nightmare for the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu

Although I personally never studied journalism at university, my colleagues who did were never taught about surviving kidnappings, or how to identify booby traps or landmines. Regrettably though, this kind of education has now become mandatory for anyone who wants to become a journalist. A stark reminder of the lengths some will go to literally shoot the messenger.

Unfortunately, however, there isn’t any training on how to survive the merciless onslaughts of dictatorships and autocratic regimes; how to persevere despite some of the richest and most powerful governments in the world doing all they can to silence you; there’s no course for that. Instead at Al Jazeera we’ve been forced to figure that out first-hand.

Since our launch more than 20 years ago, we’ve had our bureaus closed in different countries on several occasions. Our offices have been bombed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza, and several of my colleagues have been killed, many others imprisoned.

Finding ourselves in the crossfire of repressive governments is nothing new. Attacks have failed to silence the Arab world’s first independent news network. Instead, they have strengthened our resolve and our belief in our mission – namely providing our audiences with high quality, factual and informative news and representing them with "the opinion and the other opinion".

Their failure to silence us seems to have led certain regimes to pursue other tactics in their bid to muzzle free press in the Middle East, and dare I say in the world as a whole.

This new approach began with Egypt and has since seen Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and more recently Israel following suit. Rather than using overtly violent methods, these governments have instead tried to present a legitimate facade for their repressive policies.

They are justifying closing down Al Jazeera’s offices and barring our satellite transmission by claiming that the network incites violence and terrorism.

Covering the occupation

Some may be surprised that Israel, the self-proclaimed sole democracy in the Middle East, has decided to join the attack on press freedom and move towards shutting Al Jazeera. They shouldn’t. Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars on Gaza and Lebanon has proven to be a nightmare for the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment.

Were it not for Al Jazeera, the world may not have known about the 2006 Qana massacre. Israel’s use of white phosphorus on the besieged Gaza Strip may have gone unnoticed, were it not for Al Jazeera English being the only international English language channel present. The 2014 World Cup would have come and gone without the public being made aware of the cold blooded murder of four Palestinian boys by Israeli naval fire as they played football on a Gaza beach.

Despite the counter revolutions succeeding in quashing the Arab Spring, the demand for freedom and greater social justice amongst Arab societies is greater than ever before

More recently, Israel’s attempt to further entrench its illegal occupation of Jerusalem didn’t feature on Egyptian or Emirati news channels. It barely found airtime on leading International outlets - and when it did, the narrative was one of Israel’s never-ending quest for security in the face of innate Palestinian violence, not one of an occupying power that has systematically and intentionally pursued an agenda of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem in a bid to rid the city of its indigenous Arab population.

On Al Jazeera, however, my colleagues led the way in presenting all the facts through informative news reports. We gave airtime to Israeli officials and pundits like Micky Rosenfeld and others, while also speaking to Palestinian officials from all the different factions.

Fear of an educated public

We provided our audiences with the necessary information, perspectives and context for them to make their own informed decisions. And it is that, an educated public, which Israel and its autocratic allies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi fear the most.

The irony behind Israel’s attack on Al Jazeera is that prior to its launch, there wasn’t a single Arabic language channel that allowed for Israeli officials to appear on its airwaves. It was Al Jazeera that broke that taboo, and we did that because of our belief in one of the most basic yet important tenet of human rights, namely the right to be informed.

Of course, as a news network, we aren’t flawless. There have been times that we’ve made mistakes and instances where individuals have exercised poor judgement.

One of these, for example, include a time when a former employee of Al Jazeera decided to celebrate the birthday of former Hezbollah prisoner Samir Quntar as he hosted him on his talk show. However, our belief is that those who have genuine criticism of our work should present it to us so that we can discuss it and rectify that which needs correcting. That is how progressive democratic societies operate.

The Middle East is currently witnessing one of the most tumultuous periods in recent times. Despite the counter revolutions succeeding in quashing the Arab Spring, the demand for freedom and greater social justice amongst Arab societies is greater than ever before.

The region’s absolute monarchies and dictatorships are well aware of this, and that is why they are waging a war on Al Jazeera. Not because we support any particular group, or oppose them, but because like it or not, we are the manifestation of free press in the Arab world.

We are the main outlet that reflects the concerns, aspirations and dreams of the Arab street; we are the foremost institution that speaks truth to power.

As I have mentioned, there are times that we get things wrong, but when those wanting to shut us down are being led by a country where women aren’t allowed to drive or a state whose policies have been labelled as apartheid by the likes of Desmond Tutu, then I’m pretty confident we’re currently doing things right.

Photo: An employee working inside the office of Al Jazeera network in Jerusalem 7 August (Reuters)

- Jamal Elshayyal is an international award-winning senior correspondent for Al Jazeera English. He joined the channel in 2006 as part of its launch team and served as its first Middle East editor. He covered the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He has interviewed several world leaders and has extensive access to major power players in the GCC and the MENA region.

Does Netanyahu need a smoke screen for his corruption scandal or is there a more sinister reason for banning Al Jazeera?

The present attempt by the government of Israel to close down Al Jazeera's offices in Jerusalem reflects a potentially far-reaching shift in the perceived power and role of critical media, not just in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but across the Arab world and larger Middle East and North Africa.

The move is particularly odd since Al Jazeera and Israel have long had a symbiotic, if often adversarial, relationship. Despite long-standing and often harsh criticism of the Israeli occupation and its policies, Israel has afforded the channel relatively wide latitude in its coverage. There have been repeated grumblings over the years, and threats to close down its bureaus, but it hasn't prevented coverage and commentary by Al Jazeera's staff and contributing writers.

Al Jazeera's offices - like other media organisations - have been located for years in the same complex as the Government Press Office. Showing up for press credentials from the network has never caused any more trouble than I've experienced when I requested credentials for US news organisations, for example. In fact, it often felt like the relationship with Al Jazeera was a source of pride for Israeli media and press officials, one that reflected the unique set of circumstances that served each side well.

For Israel, Al Jazeera, particularly the original Arab network, provided the government unprecedented opportunities to speak to Arab citizens across the region, beginning in the 1990s - at the height of the Olso peace process. The fact that Al Jazeera allowed Israeli officials and, through its reports, ordinary citizens to speak unfiltered was an unprecedented opening for Israel to the outside world, an opening worth what it perceived as negative coverage.

On the other hand, Al Jazeera's access to Israeli officials and commentators gave the network a chance to expand on the usual narrow set of viewpoints presented in other Arab networks and to challenge - on the air - the official Israeli narrative.

So why, after allowing Al Jazeera to operate during some of the most intense violence of the occupation (including the sieges of Nablus and Jenin and the various and increasingly deadly attacks on Gaza), would the Israeli government suddenly feel it's so important to terminate Al Jazeera's presence in Jerusalem?

Is it to push attention away from the two corruption investigations of Benjamin Netanyahu - a scandal that some media have called "the most serious political crisis" for the Israeli PM? Perhaps Al Jazeera is a convenient scapegoat for Netanyahu's failures and his increasing lack of popularity at home.

Or perhaps Israel is jumping on the bandwagon of the campaign against Al Jazeera launched by Saudi Arabia and the UAE?

It could be that Israeli media experts sense that the attacks on Qatar and Al Jazeera by so many other Arab governments are beginning to gain steam in the Arab public sphere, and thus Israel is trying, in its own twisted way, to support them, as a way of gaining favourable coverage in their official media.

Israeli Communications Minister Ayoub Kara has tried to justify the move by accusing Al Jazeera of causing Israel "to lose the lives of the best of our sons", adding "when we see that all these countries have determined as fact that Al Jazeera is a tool of the Islamic State [group], Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, and we are the only one who have not determined that, then something ludicrous is happening here." The ludicrousness of the charge that Al Jazeera is enabling the killing of Israeli soldiers is not relevant here; what matters is how Israel is trying to position itself as part of a larger, Arab-led, coalition against terrorism.

It also could be that the Israeli government has developed such good, and more or less open, relationships with Arab governments across the region that it no longer needs access to Al Jazeera's viewers. Perhaps the Israeli government has decided that it simply can do without communicating with Arab people directly, since both the rise of intense illiberalism, censorship and sectarianism have rendered such policies superfluous, and the changing mood in the Arab and official public spheres mean that many Arabs no longer even care about Israel or the occupation have equally rendered the exposure Al Jazeera afforded Israelis no longer important.

There is one other possibility, however: That Al Jazeera has become more dangerous than ever. The rise of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement to global prominence as a mechanism of worldwide resistance to the occupation has occurred, in good measure, because of the constant negative media coverage of Israel's intensifying grip on Palestine.

Among mainstream or major media outlets, few have been as successful and focused on placing the realities of the occupation before the court of world opinion as Al Jazeera and The Guardian. Thus, the attempt to shut it down now could be the result of a determination that its coverage is, in fact, seriously harming Israel's standing internationally, and, perhaps even more worryingly, that the government plans on engaging in actions in the near future - from another all-out assault on Gaza to the de facto or de jure annexation of significant territory in the West Bank- that it cannot afford to have covered in the critical manner that Al Jazeera would provide.

Whatever the reasons for the change in policy, the decision to force Al Jazeera from Jerusalem hints at a shift in Israeli strategic calculations that should worry anyone who cares not just about freedom of the press, but about the explosion of yet another Israeli-Palestinian war.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Irvine, and a distinguished visiting professor at Lund University.